


bug spray and other antidotes

by MMagpieMcCorkle



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Friendship, Gen, Illnesses, Jake Was Conceived By Science, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Unconventional Families, Unconventional Relationship, illness recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 16:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19772479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMagpieMcCorkle/pseuds/MMagpieMcCorkle
Summary: Jake considers himself lucky.





	bug spray and other antidotes

**Author's Note:**

> au where: 1) umbrella is Not That Bad (altho still shady probs), and 2) Jake & his mum live with Albert uwu (but it's not _really_ Albert/Eva tbh, it's friends with the benefit of combined genetic material in the form of Jake)
> 
> also this is multichaptered bc uh short things 8) per chapter, altho it's not really in any chronological order

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jake daydreams, and so does Eva. Wistful can mean something secretly painful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in 1998, when Jake is 6, Albert is 38, and Eva is 32

When left to his own devices, Jake's a dreamer, watching wallpaper or the vaguely-acknowledged images on the TV screen or the bright blue sky outside of his bedroom window. Eva says he gets it from _her_ mother's side of the family: wistful and hoping. Sometimes, when she talks about her family in Edonia, she gets a little distant look in her eyes too, like she's daydreaming or remembering, her smile straining like her face is being pulled taut. He's told her, once, that she looks like a wax statue when she pulls that face, and at first he thought he'd said something _mean_ because her eyebrows scrunched together in a down-towards-the-middle way and her mouth looked like it was ready to shout, but then she rocked back in her chair a second later laughing as loud as a chainsaw and her smile is back but not taut and her eyebrows, although he couldn't see from that angle, were no longer in an angry scrunch. He laughed and surged close to hug.

"I thought I made you angry, Mom," he'd said in Edonian. He liked to speak English and German with Albert, and Edonian and only a bit of English with Eva, and even that last is only when they were out in public.

"No dear," she says, her wax statue smile coming back as she hugged him close and tight. " _No_ , you could never make me ma--" She then split off into a coughing fit, probably brought on by her (now seemingly forced laughing fit). Jake wriggled out of his mother's grip, not liking the harsh staccato noise right in his ear, and patted her gently on the back, muttering, "There-there, Mom, there-there." He'd combed his little fingers through her hair like he'd seen his father do on the nights when she was _really_ ill, before she started her treatment.

After a glass of water, they played board games, and after seven rounds of Snakes & Ladders, it was dinner time, and Jake reminded Eva to take her medicine immediately afterwards, like the doctors said. Yeah, the doctors were from the company Mom and Dad worked at, even though Mom had to take time off for her recovery, but he _knows_ there are doctors there like the ones in a hospital. Or else they wouldn't have the title of "doctor". Just silly. Besides, Mom's making a recovery: no more blood in her coughs, and she only vomits rarely now, instead of every evening when Jake's trying to sleep, and covers his ears and tries not to cry over the terrible fear of his mother dying.

Albert comes home a bit after ten, stating a heavier workload than usual, and Eva says she's so glad to have missed it, half-sarcastic. Jake keeps telling her that rest is good, and Eva keeps telling him, in rebuttal, that she knows that, but she likes work, gives her something to do, as much as she _loves_ staying at home with Jake and taking it easy.

Clinical as ever -- which Jake understands to a degree, because Dad explained it as an easy way of processing things without tiptoeing needlessly around the issue -- Albert asks if Eva threw up today, or coughed blood, or if there were any other abnormalities cropping up. Eva said there was only a little coughing fit, a sore chest for a few minutes from coughing so _hard_ , but no blood. Jake didn't recall her mentioning a hurt chest, so he frowns for a moment, then clears up and pipes up.

"I made her laugh really hard, that's why she was coughing."

Dad's eyebrows raise in that questioning-for-the-sake-of-humouring-you way. "Oh? How'd you make her laugh?"

"I said her face looked like a wax statue face sometimes."

Jake was grinning, leaning into his palm (with elbows on the table), and poking at his remaining peas, but Albert looked... a little shocked. Only by the particular way his eyebrows are still raised, but differently, and the way his eyes widen ever so slightly. One of the looks when Jake is about to receive a telling-off -- no loud voices, just a bunch of questions about what Jake thought about this and that, always waiting on an answer he didn't really have.

Eva jumped in, snorting. "It _did_ make me laugh. Caught me off-guard, but it made me _laugh_." Then a deliberate downing of her juice glass, then her _other_ medication: conversation closed.

* * *

Later, when Jake was in bed and staring at the patterns of the wallpaper because he couldn't drift off to sleep, not even after his mother read him an entire story, he hears both of his parents out in the hallway, through the crack of his slightly-open door. Mom sounded upset, sniffling, and then he thought that he actually did upset her by calling her wistful-daydream face a wax statue face, and her being upset would make her more sick, and he started to panic and started to tug the covers off when Dad's voice, clear as glass, cut through in Edonian:

"You miss them."

A sniff, a noise of agreement.

"I'll stay up with you."

"Thank you, Albert."

Jake flopped back down onto his bed after Dad and Mom went to stay in Mom's room, and tried to think about who she could be missing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments & (helpful!) critique are welcomed!


End file.
